NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, flagging morale, unpopular reorg

It seems like it&#x27;s pretty hard for the government to compete with private industry in compensation. Federal pay grades are capped by Congress, and the top grade is around ~$150k a year [1]. And note that since it&#x27;s the top of the scale, you have to start people off lower so that there is salary progression.<p>Pretty sure a top cryptographer or security expert should be worth several times that, especially if they are also dealing with classified information and safeguarding all the data collection (e.g. if the NSA is going to spy on us, wouldn&#x27;t you like that to be as secure as possible?).<p>This is another reason why we&#x27;re going to enter an era of corporate feudalism. There has been a cycle of:<p>1. perception of gov&#x27;t incompetence<p>2. normal people ask &#x27;why are we paying people so much for doing a bad job?&#x27;<p>3. gov&#x27;t pay scales fall further behind private industry<p>4. rise in relative mediocrity<p>5. repeat<p>I think voters largely don&#x27;t realize how much competence actually costs in the market now and will vent about their justified perceptions of inequality by preventing equalization of pay between the gov&#x27;t and private sectors, but that will paradoxically just make things worse in the long run as the private sector snaps up all the talent and we end up with a barely-functioning federal bureaucracy.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;work.chron.com&#x2F;nsa-pay-scale-16399.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;work.chron.com&#x2F;nsa-pay-scale-16399.html</a>

There&#x27;s a lot of blaming of external factors being injected into this discussion. Namely, government pay scales, and the Trump factor.<p>But let&#x27;s not forget the NSA&#x27;s own self-inflicted wounds as well. Let&#x27;s see, here&#x27;s what I remember:<p>* mission creep<p>* overreach<p>* LOVEINT<p>* massive collection of bulk intelligence with dubious justifications<p>* withholding information about 0 days it wanted to stockpile for its own use<p>* misleading technical committees so as to weaken encryption and security related standards<p>* introducing flawed security protocols<p>* paying money to security companies (RSA) to introduce weaknesses<p>* (thus with the above four items) actively sabotaging its own mission of helping to secure our nation&#x27;s systems<p>* allowing its documents to be leaked en masse<p>* allowing possibly its most powerful and dangerous (though we don&#x27;t know) sets of tools to be leaked as well.<p>Did I forget anything?

Not surprising. They’ve gone from having the perception of being the most elite organization for hackers to more of what is described in Good Will Hunting [1].<p>Perception is everything. I say this as someone who dreamt of working at the NSA for most of my high school years, but would now never even consider it.<p>Edit: although I bet a lot of it is the 4x-5x salary jump you can get in cyber security jobs by having the NSA on your resume. :-)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=mJHvSp9AKYg</a>

Speaking from experience, I applied to the NSA a few years ago and its surreal how unrealistic the expectations were.<p>a major problem with NSA employment is the mandatory 5 year contractor like status period with half-pay. the NSA expects seasoned professionals from the private sector to join its ranks with a 33k salary? get real. The agency also prides itself on an almost obscene reliance on Polygraphs, a technology no more accurate or scientifically sound than a babushka shuffling chicken bones and reading tea leaves.<p>I also wasnt exactly blown away by the interview questions. my technical screening for a Linux position came from former members of the military, who grilled me on 2 unix questions before asking if they could switch to windows, confessing they &#x27;didnt know much linux.&#x27;

When I was just about to graduate from University, I had an offer from Amazon on the way (yay internships) but not really in-hand yet, so I kept interviewing. One of the options was CSEC, Canada&#x27;s NSA.<p>The stark reality was that at Amazon, in 2 or 3 years I would be making double what CSEC was offering. Early career pay in one was end-career pay in the other. They seemed nice, and I suppose what they were doing felt <i>important</i>, but the money was simply too good to turn down. (No regrets either- I worry if I&#x27;d gone with them, I might have wound up living in Russia with a roommate named Ed.)

This is a problem across all of government. As a mediocre senior software engineer with no reports, I was paid more last year than the goddamn President of the United States (and no, it&#x27;s not because I got lucky with stock). This is completely stupid and unacceptable.<p>Of course our choices are going to be Hillary vs Trump if we pay the top leader in the country less than a mediocre software engineer. Of course Hillary will give secret speeches to Wall St firms - how else is she going to pay her bills? Of course the government is going to be incompetent and corrupt - we can&#x27;t hire good people at the salaries we&#x27;re paying unless they use their influence to obtain side gigs in the private sector (often after their service, but that means they won&#x27;t do anything to annoy their future bosses).<p>Why does Sundar Pichai make 500x more than the President? Do we, as a society, value running Google well 500x more than running our government well?<p>Government salaries need to be raised significantly (2-500x) across the board, or the government will continue being the mess it is now.

&gt; The brain drain has been so pronounced that at one gathering in 2016 of the agency’s elite hacking division, one individual raised the concern with Rogers directly. According to several people familiar with the exchange, Rogers disputed that there was any increase in attrition and told his employees that they should stop complaining and get back to work.<p>Remember this. As someone who started their professional life in 2000, lived through 2009, and went through a multinational&#x27;s &quot;reorg&quot; (mass-firing by geography, several 10s of thousands of people), let me tell you :<p>As soon as you notice there is general discontent, and people no longer care enough about their jobs to ask questions like this to the top brass, it is time to make sure you have another job lined up. You can get better jobs this way, and the hammer will come down.<p>Above all, know that this Rogers guy is fairly honest. And yet, he directly contradicts the Washington Post. He&#x27;s an exec, and he has ONE job : do exactly what his superiors say without bother them.<p>He (once for me it was a she) will NOT give you any piece of information you do not already have. They are there to get people to work together.<p>By &quot;motivating&quot;.<p>By lying.<p>By cheating.<p>This means that when it comes to the health of the company and your future job prospects, a sober chat with the cleaning staff will yield more useful information than an hour long &quot;fireside chat&quot; with a highly placed manager. Not because they know a lot, but simply because they don&#x27;t lie, and they know a little. An executive is not talking to you, except in the way a vet is talking to stray dogs at the impound. They don&#x27;t respect you, they can&#x27;t do anything for you, they don&#x27;t like you ... and they&#x27;re very, very good at hiding this (just look at financial presentations on youtube, say of the IBM CEO, knowing that she has for years, every 2 months or so, fired 1000+ people, with the constant online reports of them getting cheated out of severance. Listen to her, then think about the kind of person who does that. You half expect to get free candy and a hug every 2 minutes or so when listening to her. Or listen to Clinton talking, knowing that he&#x27;s the sort of man that threatens women to have sex with him. Think about what those people he talks to really mean to him)

This combines a long running problem in government – not being allowed to offer competitive salaries for high-demand skills — with the new presidential administration’s chaos, and the specific feeling that the agency is not a force for good. I feel bad for everyone trying to do their jobs but struggling under the weight of so much baggage.

Disclaimer: I work for the federal government, but my thoughts are my own.<p>From what I have seen, there are a mix of issues that cause this: - It takes a long time to hire someone (usually 2-3 months), and if they need a clearance, the process is even longer (some clearances can take easily over a year now, and that person cannot do any work until they have them). - A lot of people want to go into these organizations to do cool things, but then find out they have a lot of additional duties they do not wish to do. - Government salaries are capped, and it is very difficult to fire a government civilian.<p>The issue of taking a long time to hire someone means that if someone leaves, their job does not go away. So their duties have to go somewhere, usually on someone else, and that will take a minimum of 3 months if you hire someone off the street. If the job requires a clearance, you now are waiting over a year if the person did not have the right clearance (while the person sits on that spot, so you can&#x27;t hire anyone else if they come up).<p>From what I have seen, most people hired off of the streets are from college&#x2F;grad school, and they are excited to do technical work. However, since the government caps civilian salaries, they will frequently contract out technical work (so they can hire the very expensive technical personnel). This means most of the technical work is done by contractors. Civilians more often than not oversee the contractors doing the technical work. If you have a technically inclined government civilian, then those contractors frequently snatch them up.<p>So now you have a compounding problem of it is difficult to hire&#x2F;keep technical people, and the work they do is more and more non-technical, as most of the work to oversee contractors is what is called an &quot;inherently governmental function&quot;, so those have to be done by a government person. This is a negative feedback loop that really hurts keeping these types of technical people.

NSA is in the middle of a bozo explosion. It&#x27;s hard to keep good people when they have to deal with so many bozos.<p>To give you an example, there was a reorg a few years ago to outsource NSA&#x27;s IT. (Makes a lot of sense that an agency that pretty much only does IT would outsource IT, right?)<p>In the reorg, 500+ people were identified as having no discernible skill that was relevant to the mission. They were segregated into their own org and given busy work. When the outsourcing occurred, the contractor was incentivized to employ and retain them for 2 years, including the 500+. To entice them, they paid them above their government salary.<p>The contractor could not figure out what to do with them either. It treated them as &quot;casual employees&quot;. They were given a salary, but did not have to report to work and had no responsibilities. For 2 years.<p>Once the incentive ran out, these folks went back to NSA and got rehired as government employees. According to the hiring rules, they went right to the top of the stack.

&gt; The people who have left were responsible for collecting and analyzing the intelligence that goes into the president’s daily briefing<p>Cool, because the demand is gone too.

The State of California recently initiated a reclassification project for IT positions, which includes evaluating salaries. They last reclassified positions in 1976...back when Elvis was alive (note: salaries have risen modestly since that time, thankfully).

Might it also be because of the cost of overcoming their conscience? I understand that there are multiple groups in the NSA that do things other than illegal surveillance and hacking, but I would have an even higher price than other companies&#x27; offers I would require in exchange for my moral values if the NSA ever offered me any position at all...

Government work also suffers from over regulation. A friend of mine who works for a major defense contractor as an electrical engineer is literally not allowed to use a screwdriver driver. He must requisition a union worker for jobs involving a screwdriver. This takes tons of time and the simple job may ultimately never get done. In practice, he and his colleagues wait until after 5pm, when the union guys have gone, to use screwdrivers.<p>I told this story to my Uncle who worked for 30 years at a national lab. He said they had a similar problem and solution for using a broom to sweep up a mess in their work area. These stories sound unbelievable but I believe they are common and that situations like this regularly cripple and demoralize government work.

<i>Rogers disputed that there was any increase in attrition and told his employees that they should stop complaining and get back to work.</i><p>Can’t imagine why anybody would want to leave.

By way of comparison, GCHQ personnel seem to be leaving for 4-5x salary from big tech companies[1]. So do the math and figure out what the GCHQ folks are being paid.<p>Also, GCHQ has hired 494 contractors for 71m GBP[2].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.google.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;independent.gov.uk&#x2F;isc&#x2F;files&#x2F;2016-2017_ISC_AR.pdf?attredirects=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.google.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;independent.gov.uk&#x2F;isc&#x2F;files&#x2F;2016...</a>, page 40<p>[2]: Ibid, page 70

Question: how does this compare to other states?<p>I&#x27;m particularly interested in China&#x27;s equivalent(s?) of the NSA. Do they manage to retain talent? Is it because the PRC&#x27;s elite believes more in its mission? Is it higher status than the NSA? Do they offer higher relative salaries?

Wouldn&#x27;t worry too much. If they&#x27;re heading to SV, their talents may still benefit the NSA.

I&#x27;ll never forget talking to an NSA recruiter (cybersecurity expert doing a recruiting assignment, not a full-time recruiter) at a university job fair. I asked if he felt like he was really spending most of his time protecting people or if a lot of it was political agenda and budget protection, etc. His answer was, &quot;well, it&#x27;s not <i>all</i> politics...&quot; Thank you, recruiter, for making that career choice a supremely easy one.

Might expect this to ultimately lead to privatization of these services. Which is black mirror territory.

The top talent might be leaving, but the databases and the lovely toys are staying put.<p>To be used by not-top-talent.<p>Interesting times.

Honest question: What&#x27;s the skillset of a hacker at NSA? Not that I&#x27;m targeting to become one, just curious as to how someone would become a hacker.

Why work for the NSA when you can overcharge Being a contractor for an equally inept organization

Seems like we should redirect some of the funding the traditional military branches get to the NSA. The work they do is more relevant and important than ever before, and it doesn&#x27;t look like we&#x27;re going to have a hot war any time soon.

The NSA needs educated smart people. The president has denigrated education and smart people. NSA employees work for the president. Reap what you sow.

Or maybe anyone who understands cryptography enough to work at the NSA, understands bitcoin and blockchains enough to realize they can make a lot more money for a lot less effort in cryptocurrencies. Same with machine learning. The crypto bubble goes beyond money, it goes to creativity and brain drain from the rest of the economy.

Actually I remember reading at some point that the people who have the best careers in tech move between government and private at the right times, when there is going to be a downturn in the economy they move into the security of government work and work on the rules and regulations that will govern the future, as the economy turns back up they move into consulting regarding those particular rules and regulations.<p>This actually points to one of my major career mistakes in that when I left my government job I was burned out on the standard I had just spent some years seeing through to law, and instead of working consulting on it I took a totally unrelated job (based on the enticements of a friend who promised we would get to work on something I really wanted to work on)<p>I left millions on the table just by that one stupid decision. but then again I was really burned out on it.<p>on edit: improved formatting

This is not a good thing at all. This will lead to a shittier NSA and with their power, this is a lousy combination,

This isn&#x27;t just NSA, but tech positions GOV wide. Lots of locations are requiring Contractors be put on an equivalent pay scale as the GOV employees, causing them both to look elsewhere... Why take a position with less stability and benefits, for the same, and in some cases less, pay.

I wonder if there is also some people morale in this. I mean, if I was a hacker and knew what the NSA had been up to in regards of mass-surveilance, my integrity and morale would be like &quot;heck no, thies org&#x27; fucked up and I want nothing to do with them, at all!&quot;.

A lot of EU security experts (UK included) take time off to make extra money through companies like ours - senseiclub.com - to train corporate in anything from ethical hacking to certified GDPR compliance - they can&#x27;t be making much at their regular jobs.<p>Some even register their own company - which makes sense - as freelancing full time, end of the day, is possible. Make your own schedule, decline to go to work, take a month off - it&#x27;s good fun. We got some people booked for over 110 days out of 250 for 2018 already.<p>As for pensions and savings - folks go to wealth managers.<p>Hit me up if you want some really good training courses for your company or your buddy is looking for extra gigs (GCHQ folks are welcome).<p>Think productschool.com for cyber security, compliance, cloud and data.<p>Cheerio

I&#x27;d suggest separating these anonymous complaints into those which at least have boolean choices and those which have unary choices.<p><i>Reorganization of dept. has created red tape.</i> Ok, that seems like one of many opinions a source at the NSA could have.<p><i>Snowden hurt our agency and made our jobs more difficult.</i> I&#x27;m not sure that an NSA source could have any other opinions on this matter, especially given that a) I&#x27;ve never read anyone who currently works at the NSA call Snowden anything but a traitor and b) the NSA certainly knows the identity of the sources for this story. I think we have to reject such complaints as facile.

Another view: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nymag.com&#x2F;daily&#x2F;intelligencer&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;who-is-reality-winner.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nymag.com&#x2F;daily&#x2F;intelligencer&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;who-is-reality-...</a><p>That was circulated with the comment &quot;the risk is not so much people running to the Russians as people running to civil society - the NSA is not as popular as they think.&quot;<p>The NSA, like much of the US system, demands absolute unconditional loyalty. Internal dissent is not possible. Taking dissent public will get you sent to prison where you&#x27;re not allowed to speak to journalists.

I read somewhere that 70% of US intelligence spending these days was on private contracting companies anyway. I guess if you’re good you&#x27;ll end up at one of them?

Finally some good news from NSA.

&gt; the nation’s 17 spy agencies.<p>17.<p>WTF.

Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.recode.net&#x2F;2017&#x2F;5&#x2F;8&#x2F;15557846&#x2F;stripe-peiter-mudge-zatko-jon-kaltwasser-security-hire" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.recode.net&#x2F;2017&#x2F;5&#x2F;8&#x2F;15557846&#x2F;stripe-peiter-mudge...</a>

I remember predicting this back when the Snowden first leaked, and someone popular on HN saying it wouldn&#x27;t happen. I suspect the reorg and general politics outside NSA have had a bigger impact than &quot;oh, spying is wrong&quot; in popular culture, though.

In this case, an inevitable outcome is likely the privatization of more of these industries. Let companies like Palantir take over the job and ensure we have some solid regulations to ensure Thiel can&#x27;t read our emails.

I&#x27;ve got an idea, stop giving Congress free health care and stop giving Congress a $100k a year pension after they&#x27;ve resigned. Bam, there&#x27;s your competitive salary to offer NSA engineers.

Now they really won&#x27;t be able to analyze all that data...

They end up going to private corporations like Booz Allen, then the government ends up contracting these companies in the private sector lol.

Consider it has such bad reputation and public image, and subpar salary this is not surprising at all.

The salary cap sounds like it will lead to more outsourcing, which would increase expenses overall.

They probably hoped, if they work long enough for the man, they&#x27;ll become the man.

I would love to work for them, creative interesting projects with funding, pick me!

What&#x27;s wrong in leaving when somebody is paying better?

&gt;If the NSA is going to spy on us, wouldn&#x27;t you like that to be as secure as possible?<p>I&#x27;d rather those perverts not peep on us; this isn&#x27;t an unreasonable request.

Don&#x27;t hire these people!

Good?

with luck, mentioning NSA on your resume results in an immediate trip to the discard pile during applications at most tech companies.<p>if you&#x27;re going to invade privacy on a massive scale, you better be ready for the consequences.

I&#x27;m hiring ;)

This is happening across the US government as a whole. The US State department is dead for instance.<p>When you have talent and options why stay with a creaky ship that&#x27;s sailing straight into a hurricane with a mad captain at the helm?

My favorite is that the more the FBI&#x2F;NSA spends, the more government debt get printed. You may know that the government shutdown is because of a debt ceiling.

LOL.

good.

Tis article reeks of Executive Branch propaganda from anonymous sources &quot;according to current and former U.S. officials&quot; etc etc

Been the story since George bush. I wonder if they would have acted narrowly within the law if they would have had better org

&gt; The people who have left were responsible for collecting<p>&gt; and analyzing the intelligence that goes into the<p>&gt; president’s daily briefing.<p>I seem to recall that the president&#x27;s daily briefing is now a single page with pictures. How many people does it take to produce that?

the CIA funded Washington Post sullying the good name of those noble domestic spying NSA&#x27;ers?<p>Faker News